Not because I’ve run out of things to say, but because the response is so predictable when I do. Within minutes, the Assange fanboys – the Wikiliebers, if you like – will swarm into the comments, accusing me of unfairly slandering their hero. “He’s sticking it to The Man!” They’ll cry, “he’s disrupting the mainstream media!” They’ll holler, “it was a honeytrap!” No forest of Vanity Fair and New Yorker profiles or unrelated criminal allegations or hubristic statements about having “two wars I have to end” will convince the Wikiliebers of the truth: that Assange is an arrogant computer genius who began Wikileaks with the best of intentions but has since lost sight of his principles in the relentless pursuit of personal celebrity.

But if I take some flak for my relatively inconsequential badgering of Assange, I can only imagine how much Bill Keller must be getting right now.
Knight Foundation Hands Out Grants to 12 Groups, but Not WikiLeaks. The Knight Foundation announced on Wednesday 12 winners of its News Challenge grants, projects costing a total of $2.74 million that will use new technology to spread information in local areas. The winners included a platform for collaborating to report local news and a plan to spread virtual town halls across Vermont. Among the 2,400 proposals passed over was one from the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks, which was asking for more than a half-million dollars to be spent over two years to bring its anonymous method of leaking documents to local newspapers.
Why not back to Sweden now? (C. Bennett)
It could be a quality lost on suspicious interviewers, or one he has quite recently acquired, but in all the profiles I have read of the extraordinary Julian Assange, none has begun to convey the man's dazzling effect on his admirers, male as well as female.

For the woman who last week flourished the placard: "Julian, I want your babies", his release from Wandsworth must have come as particularly welcome news. But his chief British benefactor, the former army officer Vaughan Smith, has shown that the Assange effect goes way beyond standard manipulation of the groupie-reflex. Smith's atmospheric account of the night before his hero turned himself in might easily have been set in the Tower of London, on the eve of a royal execution.

"I feel that I am intruding," Smith writes, "but Julian smiles at me. He does that: brings you in and makes you feel you are important to him when most of us would feel too preoccupied to do such a thing.
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WikiLeaks and Julian Paul Assange. The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic.

The shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city, even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes and a mop of silver-white hair, arrived to rent the place. Assange was dressed in a gray full-body snowsuit, and he had with him a small entourage. “We are journalists,” he told the owner of the house.
Judith Miller attacks WikiLeaks. Smears & Misconceptions. December 30, 2010 | Like this article?

Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The corporate media's tendency to blare misinformation and outright fabrications has been particularly egregious in coverage of WikiLeaks. As Glenn Greenwald has argued, mainstream news outlets are parroting smears and falsehoods about the whistleblower site and its founder Julian Assange, helping to perpetuate a number of "zombie lies" -- misconceptions that refuse to die no matter how much they conflict with known reality, basic logic and well-publicized information. Here are the bogus narratives that keep appearing in newspapers and on the airwaves. 1. That's not to say that the exposure of secret government files can't somehow lead to someone, somewhere, someday, being hurt. 2. Greenwald and others have battled to kill the myth that the whistleblower site threw up all the cables without taking any precautions to protect people, but it keeps coming up. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Anti-WL lies & propaganda. The Swiss postal system stripped WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of a key fundraising tool Monday, accusing him of lying and immediately shutting down one of his bank accounts.

The swift action by Postfinance, the financial arm of Swiss Post, came after it determined the “Australian citizen provided false information regarding his place of residence during the account opening process.” Assange had told Postfinance he lived in Geneva but could offer no proof that he was a Swiss resident, a requirement of opening such an account. Postfinance spokesman Alex Josty told The Associated Press the account was closed Monday afternoon and there would be “no criminal consequences” for misleading authorities.

“That’s his money, he will get his money back,” Josty said. “We just close the account and that’s it.” The setback leaves Assange with only a few options for raising money for his secret-spilling site through a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center and accounts in Iceland and Germany.